Dominating Niches And Profitable Keyword Research
June 10, 2009 by admin
We have all seen many ebooks or courses that come out on the market that claim to teach you about dominating niches of your choice, becoming an authority in your niche, and all of the rest of it. One thing I’ve noticed in many of these products themselves is that they really lack in teaching people some very helpful strategies in knowing that they are indeed picking proper keywords for making that niche profitable. It’s one thing to find a niche to dominate, but, let’s be real here, if it isn’t going to amount to profits then why would we want to waste our time. After all, as marketers we are in this to make money!
Dominating profitable niches would be more the key to a person’s success. There are tons of niches we could uncover, many quite obscure, but it doesn’t mean they are going to be profitable. It also doesn’t mean that the keywords your choosing to optimize your blog or website for are profitable keywords either! In marketing we have what we call “browsing keywords”, and also what many of us refer to as “buying keywords”.
Browsing keywords are often typed in by people that are only in the stage of doing some research about a certain market they may be interested in. For instance, a browser might type in a term such as “flat screen tv’s”. We may get some traffic from a browser, but generally speaking this person isn’t quite at the buying stage in the cycle of his research yet. So in essence, putting a lot of effort into ranking for a keyword phrase such as this could very well be a lot of work for the results. If choosing keywords to optimize our blogs and sites for we need to be doing whatever we can to be “swaying the odds of a person buying”, in our favor as much as possible.
It’s very important to understand these points. When you are thinking about “dominating niches”, it’s obviously the people who are making the most money in that niche, that are the dominant ones. If you aren’t making a good chunk of the profits for yourself it could very well be due to the fact that this competitor is out performing you because he knows how to go after the profitable keywords. He isn’t wasting time with the browsing keywords, and neither should you! Also, in many cases the competition for ranking well for “profitable” keywords, can be sufficiently less than with “browsing” keywords. This is due to the fact that many websites and blog owners are not understanding this fundamental element either, and are beating each other over silly, trying to rank for keywords that won’t turn into profit for them anyway. Or very little, in most cases…
So how do we sway the odds in our favor, and give us a gauge to go by in choosing whether our keywords we are choosing are likely to be more profitable than others?
There are a couple of ways in which we can do this, but let’s start off with the more manual approach to finding profitable keywords. There is a tool available to us which measures the Commercial Intent of keyword phrases or sites which we can find at:
http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx
A step by step approach to this would be for instance:
1. First of all, we need to make sure that the Commercial Intent tool is set to “Query”. You can do this just by selecting the proper radio button below the search box.
2. Below I have selected just a few keywords in the “self improvement niche”, simply to test out.
It’s only a handful or so, and although some may seem a little broad, they are chosen just to give you a good example of just how choosing the proper phrases will sway the odds in your favor somewhat.
These keywords were found beforehand using the Google Adwords Keywords Tool.
Communication Skills
Communication Training
Leadership Skills
Leadership Training
Negotiating Skills
Negotiation Skills
People Skills
Soft Skills Training
Winning With People
As you can see from the image above, we have a spot in which we can enter keywords to find out the commercial intent of these “keyword phrases” before we actually decide to optimize a web page or blog post before hand.
3. Simply begin to copy each separate keyword phrase into the tool and hit “go”. The result returned will either be a Commercial Intent result, or a Non-Commercial Intent result. For the purpose of selecting good keywords it’s usually a good rule of thumb to be shooting for a positive Commercial Intent of .65 or higher.
Let’s have a quick look at the phrase “Communication Skills”.
From the shot above we can see that the phrase “Communication Skills” has a Non-Commercial intent of 1. So this really isn’t a term that would be meeting our needs if we are shooting for people who may be more interested in purchasing something in the personal development niche.
Let’s take a look at the phrase “Winning With People”.
With the term “Winning With People”, the returned result is definitely more of what we would be looking for. You can see the it has a Commercial Intent of .8 . This is a good indicator…let’s try one more!
Let’s try the term “Leadership Training” and see what the result is.
Once again, we have a positive result on the plus side of Commercial Intent.
Sometimes when using this tool for different keyword phrases it can bring back some surprising results. As Internet Marketers we would always want to be trying to sway the odds in our favor of making sales whenever possible. When you are looking at dominating niches, or at least being profitable in your chosen niche it can make all the difference in the world by choosing the proper keywords.
Another great example of good “buying” keywords is the actual model numbers of certain products. If a person is looking for a digital camera for instance, and knows the exact brand and model number he is interesting in, chances are he has already done his research and has already made his buying decision.
Certainly, it would be much easier to rank for a term like “CanonEOS50d”, as opposed the the term “digital cameras”. Granted, the amount of traffic volume you can expect with “buying keywords” may be sufficiently less, but the people typing in these phrases are the one’s with their credit card in hand, ready to make a purchase. Now, this is the kind of traffic we want! I hope you are beginning to see the importance of why our keyword research is so important to us as marketers on the Internet.
There is a newer software tool on the market which I’ve been using since it was released. It used to have a completely free version, as well as a paid version. Personally, I picked up the paid version as a beta tester before they increased the price. I just went to their website and noticed that the Free version is now only available for a 12 Day Trial. This tool is so new, they haven’t even had a chance to set up an affiliate program for it yet.
The software is called Market Samurai, and the information that it releases about certain keywords is quite mind boggling to say the least. It also brings back the Commercial Intent of hundreds of keywords all at the same time. It can be a huge time saver when performing your keyword research. If you’d like to see the full power of this tool, I recommend you give it a test drive for yourself. I’m sure you will see just how powerful a tool this could be for you.
Have fun dominating niches, and be sure to be using profitable keyword research for your improved success!
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The endless bottomless topic, SEO….this is a great article and if any other readers of this blog are like me, and not quite ready for the Market Samurai software, be sure to read his blog! Thanks Davin!
Diannes last blog post..Ballet Shoes and the Perfect Pointe Muscles
Thanx Dianne! Hope all has been well with you..take care.
Davin
Thanks Davin. When I have some free time, I will checkout the software. Great post!
Holly Manns last blog post..How to Set Twitter on Autopilot & Profit
Thank you Holly! Yeah, that really is an impressive piece of software and definitely worth checking out. Always a pleasure having you stop by Holly…thanx again.
what powerful information. i for one will be putting it to work thanks for sharing it.
Great! I’m glad you enjoyed the article and found it helpful Ian. All the best to you…
Thanks Davin, this is a very useful method for checking whether your keywords are likely to reward your efforts when building web pages.
It’s a great place to start before doing all the heavy lifting, obviously it’s not foolproof, however at the very least it’s a strong indicator.
Hello Davin, Very interesting. Up until a week or so ago I had been using a combination of plain old Google search with Google Free Adwords tool. At that point I was introduced to Market Samurai and even though I have only used it a few times, I am amazed at what this tool can apparently do.
It’s great to learn about the MS site as well! I know others use WordTracker’s Free tool as well but as with everything, each to their own
As always, thanks for the great insight,
[...] You Dominating Niches Or Getting Slaughtered When it comes to dominating niches online a person has to be aware that his keyword research is above all the most important factor. There is [...]
This appears to be a very cool tool, I for one shall be checking it out further. I have bookmarked it further reference, thank you.
I went to the tool for potential intent to buy and found Non-Commercial intent below .6 for Microsoft.com. I would have thought that their main landing page and using a tool they endorse would have been optimized for this area. I recently posted a blog on business consulting that had a Commercial intent of .9 and I am happy with that even if not over 1.0.
Hmm, wow that’s really interesting hey Bob. I would never have thought to run Microsoft.com through it. Makes you think…? Great job with your post, sounds like you found some positive feed back and results.
Cheers and thanx for sharing here…
Davin
Yeah it’s very important to use the right keywords within your theme. It’s best to have a tight group of the keywords that closely related to each other and to start with the broadest/general keywords at the top of the theme and specific/long tails keywords further down the theme. There’s lots of tools out that bring back hundreds of keywords without telling you the relation, they have to each other.
People search and find content through keyword based queries. Search engines crawl, reference and index content on the basis of keywords. It is therefore logical that you research the keywords best representing the product or service you wish to sell and prepare content based on such keyword choices.
Yes, that’s right Andreas. Thanx for mentioning that for people…
Great article. So many people waste a lot of time (and money) in spreading their marketing too thin. It is so nice to see a step by step process to finding the right keywords to use. Very valuable!
The url you gave for determining commercial intent of a website and also analyzing particular keywords is a new one for me. Very valuable.
At this time, my website is an informational blog format with the intent to capture prospects’ opt in contact information and sell to them over a period of time with autoresponders.
Internet marketing is such a wide open arena!
You are absolutely right and thanks for showing us a great tool. So many are speaking about key word but as you mention it is much better to rank high on commercial key word than non commercial. What you want to attract is visitors that already have done their research and are now ready to buy. Choosing keyword with the customer purchasing life cycle in mind is a great profitable strategy. Thanks for remind us.
Davin, remarkable tool. I just downloaded it and am looking forward to using it as I get my newest blog up and running at full speed. Thanks!
This is excellent information. Many people don’t want to take the time to do keyword research in the first place, or don’t really understand how to do it.
It makes a lot more sense to find keywords that people are searching for and that will lead to providing them with your valuable products or services.
This is an article to forward and to bookmark so that it can be read until it is fully understood.
That’s a very good point, Davin. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but now that you point it out it’s obvious. After all, I do it myself. When I am doing research into a product I use general product terms and when I am ready to buy I am specific, as in your camera example. Thank you
Great! Thank you yourself Michael..I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
Davin
Commercial Intention is a great concept, and I’ll try and use it when choosing leadership related keywords for my leadership website.
Its a common problem I face - people searching for ‘leadership’ certainly aren’t a self-selecting ‘purchase-ready’ bunch of people at all, so being more selective will probably mean a more effective leadership marketing campaign.
Simon Oatess last blog post..My Journey & The Secret To My Success
Great article, really in-depth with some of the details. I’ve recently wrote an article on this as well. Great read though.
Max Oreluss last blog post..Keyword Research for Profitable Blog Niche
You raise some interesting and important points. What’s the use of ranking for a keyword with lots of searches when everyone who does the searches is just looking for information? It may be a nice ego boost, but if your intent is commercial (i.e. making money) then it’s useless.
What I find intriguing is to guess the algorithms behind this Microsoft tool. It occasionally gives some surprising results. I also believe that it’s an area where marketers can bring some real creativity to the table. You’ve suggested some markers of commercial intent, like model numbers. I think each of us can imagine a potential buyer’s online journey from research to a buying decision and try to guess exactly what they’d be looking for at that decision point.
Interesting artical. I am working on ranking higher in my current niche, and it seems that i need a bit more organization and executing a plan. This is difficuclt for me.
Nice, I had never seen the market samurai, mostly just used whatever free tools I found, but it seems like one that could be worth the investment.
Davin. I get the point This has not occurred to me before, but now it?s so obvious. Great article. Thanks !
SEO is an endles topic) And key words being an indispensable part of it, one can always find some job by his preference!